


Il Viaggio

by dilangley



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Ezio/Leonardo if you squint, F/M, Fluff and Love and Family, If you ignore the abomination that is AC: Embers, Multi, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:07:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23688901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilangley/pseuds/dilangley
Summary: Ezio and Sofia return to Rome after their journey to Masyaf.Or how Sofia Sartor got to know the real Ezio Auditore da Firenze and his Roma.
Relationships: Ezio Auditore da Firenze/Sofia Sartor
Comments: 17
Kudos: 58





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I am way late to the party of the Assassin's Creed games. I'm COVID-bingeing them, and I'm obsessed. I am currently on Black Flag.
> 
> I write very slowly, but I have completed this story. It's three chapters, 10,000 words in total, and I'm just cleaning them up and posting them one at a time.
> 
> If you want to geek out over the Ezio trilogy with me, comment away, and I'll try to write back without TOO many exclamation points.

Sofia Sartor stared at the water lapping against the boat’s sides. 

The Tiber River was gentle as a kitten after the rough seas and roads of their journey from Masyaf to Rome itself, but still, her stomach twisted in knots. It had been five years since she had left Italy to conquer the world on her own, certain she would never return. Constantinople, with its colors and chatters and conflicts, had been home. After her father’s death, she had followed the call.

If she dwelled on it here alone at the boat railing, she might be angry at herself for abandoning a mission -- the literacy of her beloved Ottoman empire -- to join a man.

But if she turned around, she would see that man and irritation would evaporate. Ezio Auditore talked with the captain, but his eyes kept moving to his city. He did not say that, of course. He boasted of Firenze, the city of his birth, of his family. For all his arrogance, he never bragged of the city he had revolutionized and financed and freed. She had read that love between the lines of his stories.

“It is impolite to stare,” Ezio said as he stepped to her side.

“You have been guilty of it on enough occasions that I will not feel sorry.” 

He chuckled, her favorite reward for her cheek, and she leaned into his solid warmth. Her heart skittered in her throat when his lips skimmed her skin. 

“Are you nervous?” He murmured to the hollow beneath her jaw. 

“No,” she lied.

He laughed at her again, but then he held her hand as they disembarked, tucked her close to his side as they moved through the crowded Roman streets. Though she had been to this city before, it had only been in transition to somewhere else. Ezio turned it into a living, breathing storybook. He pointed to blacksmiths, told anecdotes of their opening days, and shared brief, memorable histories of ancient sites. 

When the Rome of Julius Caesar and Cicero became a gaudy, luxurious brothel, Sofia could only laugh.

“I’m sure you have many friends here,” Sofia teased as they entered La Rosa in Fiore. At the top of the plush staircase, a lightly-clad young woman strew rose petals like confetti. Her breasts bobbled enticingly with each dramatic toss. Around the lobby of the establishment, women in varying states of undress flirted with bedazzled young men. Even Sofia could not help but stare a beat too long.

“Many, many,” Ezio teased back. “But the madam is the woman I love most in the world.”

Perhaps the jealousy would not have flared in her chest if a strikingly beautiful woman had not chosen that moment to appear at the top of the stairs. The raven-haired beauty had to be the madam. What must have once been youthful radiance had turned stately on her features, but her face had few lines, her hair few greys. She wore her braids like a crown.

“Ezio,” she said warmly. 

Sofia exhaled when he called back, “Salute, Claudia.”

The madam with such bearing was Ezio’s only blood relative, the sister assassin of whom he had said so much and to whom he had written so many letters. Sofia could save her petty envy for the “many, many” lovers she would likely encounter here in Rome. For this woman, she would instead work to make a good first impression.

The Auditore siblings embraced, but when Ezio released her, Claudia swept Sofia into her arms too.

“If you’re not Sofia, get out of my establishment, but if you are, it is a true pleasure to finally meet you.”

“Then the customers are not the only ones experiencing pleasure today,” Ezio said to the ornamental ceiling, but his eyes twinkled.

“It is so nice to meet Ezio’s sister. He speaks so highly of you.”

“He’s no fool,” Claudia said. She cut him a fond look.

They retired to a sitting room and drank mid-morning wine without any regard for propriety. Sofia observed the mutual respect between these siblings and wondered if lineage or only circumstance had created these powerful twin pillars. In a life of interesting people, she had never seen anyone as magnetic as Ezio, but Claudia had a touch of the same energy.

They did not share stories. They talked of books and art and history. Sofia lost all track of time.

  
  
  


* * *

“And she is an assassin too,” Sofia repeated the fact she had long known with new awe. She began undressing before the mirror.

Ezio nodded. “During the liberation of Roma, she had her initiation. She had already waited too long.”

“She’s incredible.”

They were in a bedroom of the brothel, a velvet and leather room of pure comfort. It had more red and gold than Sofia would have selected, but Ezio had assured her no place in the city would have better food, drawn baths, or goose down pillows. Normally, none of those mattered to her, but after a long, tiring journey, she had to admit smoothing the bed cover and finding it to be silk made her smile.

Ezio helped her with her laces, his hands light and nimble as always. The warm air through the window promised her she could sleep bare, so she nudged his fingers. That was all the encouragement he needed, and he peeled her layers away until she wore only her skin. He nudged kisses along her shoulder, dipped his fingers through the valleys of her collarbone.

She shivered with pleasure. As she turned to offer him the help he did not need, just as he had done for her, she admired the body she revealed. He had the musculature of the Roman statues with the markings of the pottery. The knotty tissue on his abdomen had a story -- he had been stabbed by Checco Orsi -- but many other scars, he could not explain. His life had never given him the luxury of dwelling on injury.

Sofia, meanwhile, had a scar on her left knee from tripping into the fireplace as a small child. She could tell the tale from memory, so oft had it been repeated by her doting parents.

“Daydreaming, _cara mia?_ ” 

“Laughing at myself more like,” she replied, “and admiring your strength.”

For a man quick to compliment himself, he shied from such recognition from others and so opted to kiss her rather than hear more. He kissed her breathless, like a maiden in a silly fairy tale. 

She marveled at this pull between them.

In her youth, she had been engaged to a young soldier. Her parents had known nothing of it, of course. They were wealthy Italians abroad who may have loved parts of “these strange peoples.” However, none of those parts had involved their educated, graceful daughter becoming the bride of a rebel soldier. 

Sofia had loved him though. Sneaking out of her window became a hobby second only to her books. Theophilus had scuttled her to the most hidden corners of the city, climbed with her to beautiful vistas. They had kissed like the world was on fire, hands and bodies pawing each other for more every instant.

She laid with him only once, the night before she never saw him again. 

“I am fighting for freedom,” he had said to her as they watched the sun rise over their blanket rooftop bed. “But I love you enough to wish I wasn’t.”

Looking back and hearing that voice in memory, she still believed him, though for all she knew he simply left her without looking back. 

Ezio touched her without Theo’s desperation. It was funny, she supposed, how youth raced as if running out of time but age dallied as if time were endless. 

She turned in Ezio’s arms and smiled up at him, traced her thumb over the rough beard. 

“Show me how you take the girls to bed here at La Rosa,” she said. 

It was a flirtation, a caper, and in that, no one would ever have the upper hand over Ezio. He twirled her in a small circle, trailed his hand down her side.

“You should start by telling me how handsome I am,” he said, “and then whisper something like _nemmeno immagini cosa ho intenzione di farti.”_

“That would be very charming of me. Hardly a seduction on your part though.”

“I haven’t had to seduce a woman in years.”

They laughed their way to the bed where he proved very seductive indeed. 

  
  
  


* * *

Sofia woke up to a gentle knock on the bedroom door. Ezio hardly stirred, slept as she had never seen him rest before. His comfort in this place made her smile. The setting emboldened her, too, for she only slid her arms into a thin robe to answer the door. The courtesan smiled openly, warmly.

“Good morning, Signora Sartor.” She handed over an envelope on quality paper sealed with Claudia’s personal emblem.

“Please call me Sofia. And you are?”

The courtesan giggled. “Petra.”

“Pleased to meet you, Petra.”

“The note is from Claudia asking you to breakfast,” Petra confided. “But if you would rather, I could bring you and Signore Auditore something from the kitchen. I know your trip has been long.”

All networks of women carry information like blood in human veins, so it was no surprise to hear that the women of La Rosa in Fiore knew everything. Sofia had never had the opportunity for female friends, not the way she wished to have them. A proper young woman was only expected to interact with other proper young women, and there had been a shortage of them in the Constantinople of her youth, at least according to her parents. 

In her scholarship, it had been a world of men: often bright, often interesting, and often patronizing.

“Will I enjoy having breakfast with Claudia?”

Petra smiled warmly. “If you truly love her brother, you will find her the best person you have ever met.”

Sofia glanced back at the man sprawled across the feminine pillows, extravagantly handsome, exquisitely peaceful. For a mortifying moment, she almost followed her heart to the bed to wake him up even with company right at the door. She almost whisked to his side to promise him she would follow him anywhere as long as he asked, as long as it was the thing to bring light to his dark, deep eyes.

She coughed instead. “Should I use that as my introduction? ‘Before we butter the rolls, let me assure you I have been bewitched by your brother, not the other way around.’”

 _“Si._ That’s a good idea. You might put clothes on too. That would also set you apart from his other conquests,” Petra said. There was no jab in her gentle amusement. 

“Were you one of them?” Sofia’s question was mild. 

“Signore has never had to pay for company,” Petra’s soft giggle turned it into a compliment, “and I have never come for free.”

“Good girl.” 

The breakfast with Claudia was wonderful as promised. They found conversation where there was none, skipping the preliminaries and pleasantries. Claudia talked about the challenges of running this brothel, the tenuous balance of using the girls’ resources while saving them from the horrors of this profession. 

“They come from all walks. My Petra is a farmer’s daughter who came to Roma to escape her father’s belt. Beatrice, a noblemen’s daughter cast out after her virginity came into question. Helen, a young woman who wants to be an assassin but has not yet warranted such an invitation.”

Sofia nodded. “It is a hard world we have made for women.”

Claudia touched the brand on her ring finger. “It is a hard world we have made.”

The correction stood between them as a question. Claudia clarified it. “Is it true my brother wishes to retire?”

Sofia opened her mouth to brush away the question but closed it again. Her many weeks with Ezio, both before knowing his secret and after, had given her insights into the Auditore who walked the streets of Istanbul. But this Ezio, who slept deeply under his sister’s roof and had promised to introduce her to his brotherhood, was still a mystery.

Of course, his tired tread up the steps of Maysaf had seemed to lead to retirement.

But would his steps lighten here on their old paths and lead somewhere new? Sofia did not know enough to say.

“He saw Altair’s wisdom in his final words. He told his son to go live well. Ezio is ready to do that.”

“My brother has never known the selfishness of other men. As a boy, he loved with both hands open. It got him into trouble, I remember that, of course, but he was also the first to chase down a boy who looked at me askance, the only one in the family who never forgot to bring Petruccio his feathers…” Claudia smiled without explaining and shook her head as if to recenter her thoughts. “After Father’s death, Ezio took up his mantle. He has worked tirelessly to fulfill every legacy left at his feet. He put Roma on his back and bore it out from under a tyrant. He has always lived well, but he has never lived for himself.”

“I do not know that he can,” Sofia confessed. 

“Neither do I.” 

  
  
  
  


* * *

Sofia explored Rome on her own for the rest of the day. Her note on the bedside table had promised to return after breakfast, but it had not said a time. She took the advantage to walk along the docks of the Antico district. Gulls screeched overhead, dipping and diving to snatch bread tossed by children. She dug into her pocket for spare coins and approached the market stand. 

“ _Salute._ Do you have anything that would be better suited for the birds?” She asked. 

“I do not. All my wares are too incredible to be used in such a way.” The seller, a younger man, admired her openly. Her beauty was no secret to her. She had wielded it as power since she was a young girl who first got her way by batting eyelashes. Her gowns were custom-made, a little risque in polite Italian society and utterly indecent in Constantinople. It was a strange sensation, making herself bait to draw in customers and scholars, but she had soothed herself with the knowledge that she held all the cards.

That charming lie had been laid aside as an assassin -- Yusuf, Ezio had told her later -- died at her feet in a futile attempt to save her. Right in her shop. The same shop where she had always told herself the power was hers, the little haven that had convinced her it was safe to live in a tempestuous city completely and utterly alone.

A cold chill raced up her spine, and she wished for a new dress where his eyes could not linger along the bare skin of her breasts.

“Well, I’ll take your worst foccacia,” she said. He no longer looked so charmed, frowned his way through pulling out some stale bread, and charged her too much. She paid without thanking him.

On the edge of a dock, she broke off tiny pieces of the bread and scattered them on the dock. A gull flamboyantly landed, strutting for more every time she broke off the steady stream of crumbs.

“Point taken, little one,” she said, tossing a large chunk. The gull took its time as if knowing she would share the rest eventually. 

“He is going to shit on the boats, and the hands will be very put out with you.”

She jumped and then tilted her head to see Ezio, standing on the dock behind her. The man in black she had known now wore white robes, a red cape dramatic across his shoulder, his hair cut shorter, his beard trimmed into a goatee. 

He looked a decade younger, not like a world-weary traveler but a heroic figure with the world at his feet.

Sofia swallowed, a sudden heat rising to her cheeks. 

Ezio took a few steps closer, silent as the grave. Even knowing what he was, she still marveled at how such a big man could move soundlessly. 

“I’ll be gone before he has digested, so no one will know my crimes,” she said. He held out his hand, and she handed him a chunk of bread. He rubbed it between his fingers, spraying crumbs for the cheerful gull.

“Now they’re my crimes too,” he said. Somehow he made it sound like a promise. She tucked her arm through his.

“I like your city, Ezio Auditore da Firenze.”

This time, he did not correct her as he had all the other times she had teased or intimated Rome’s importance to him. He only smiled.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know how I said this has Ezio/Leonardo if you squint?

Sofia’s heart adjusted to this new Ezio slowly. 

In Constantinople, he had been hers and hers alone. She had not known she felt that way, would never have thought herself so arrogant. But though he had been handsome and intelligent and clearly accomplished, he had also been terribly alone. 

His loneliness had melted away by the fire in her shop. She had banished it completely with a streetside picnic.

But here in Rome, he had a family made of blood and bond, a home in the very cobbles of the streets. He stepped lighter, stood straighter, and whispered dirtier phrases in her ear at moments she least expected it. 

Today, though, they moved from cityscape to countryside on borrowed horses. Her sedate gelding twisted his neck to nuzzle her for treats periodically after discovering she carried sugar cubes in her bag. 

“I cannot believe I will be meeting Leonardo da Vinci,” Sofia marveled. “Will I find him a terrible disappointment?”

“I don’t know.” Ezio huffed out a soft whoa, drawing his horse up without tugging the reins.

“His  _ Last Supper _ is a feat of genius.”

“I would not have taken you for a fan of his religious works.”

His assessment of Sofia was accurate. Her parents had been attentive Catholics, but she had been more interested in the history of the religion itself than any inner peace or spirituality it offered. One night after mass, she had gone to the dark confessional and admitted as much to the priest. 

“You will find God if you look for him, Sofia,” the good father had offered, a kinder answer than many others throughout her life. He had been wrong, though. 

Unless the Lord was foam on the sea or the first bite of biscotti or the kiss of a beautiful man, she had never found him. 

“It’s not religious though. Not truly,” she said. “He chose the Last Supper, yes, but he could have chosen another moment if he wanted to convey the religion. Jesus washing his disciples’ feet would have been spiritual as would the pouring of the wine, but he chose a moment where the humans would outshine the Lord. The focus of the painting is their reactions to terrible news. It could just as easily be a political dinner party where someone has delivered word of a lost battle or captured spy.”

“His patrons would not be pleased to hear that,” Ezio remarked, but she ignored him.

“They say he is skilled far beyond his paints too.”

“That is true.”

“And yet you never told me you know him! Surely you had to know such a fact would have impressed me.”

He then cut her a look knowing enough to make her embarrassed. In their first meeting, he had cockily pronounced himself the most interesting man in her life, a bold claim that had turned out to actually be understatement.

“If I could not impress you on my own merits, I did not want you.”

“Oh really?”

“No.” And yet even as he said it, she was the one blushing. “I’d have told you every tale of Leonardo I know if it had ensured my chance to touch you.”

“It wasn’t necessary,” she said. 

“And thus he never came up.”

The estate was shockingly rustic. They hitched the horses themselves, no servants milling about, no adoring public waiting outside to view an artistic session. Sofia’s stomach fluttered, and though she knew it was silly, she smoothed her hair and dress. She had met rich and powerful people before, but to meet a famous mind was another matter entirely. 

Ezio did not knock on the door but walked straight in. She gasped involuntarily, following a step behind in her surprise.

There was no foyer, only a sunny kitchen where a man stood at a drawing table. His counters were piled with papers, stained with discarded paints, strewn with bowls from half-eaten meals. He turned to them, and the handsome face she had seen in profiled in books of masters broke into a radiant smile.

“Ezio!” It was pure joy. The two men came together as people who have done so many times before and held on without letting go. “I had not heard of your return to Roma!”

“I thought it best to deliver that message to my oldest friend myself.”

“Did you find what you were seeking?”

“I did.”

“You will have to tell me,” Leonardo glanced at Sofia with open curiosity, “all about it when we have time.”

“That will be today,” Ezio said. “Leonardo, may I present Signora Sofia Sartor?”

“A pleasure.” Leonardo bowed. Her cheeks burned, and she dared not look at Ezio to see the amusement on his face.

“And Sofia, may I present Leonardo?”

“It’s an honor to meet you,” she said and meant it.

Leonardo sheepishly cleared off spaces for them to sit, and as the minutes passed, Sofia’s expectations melted away. The Great Leonardo was gentle, animated, and curious. He asked Ezio myriad questions, dropped the name Altair with familiarity, spoke references Sofia could not follow. Of course, he was polite to her, looked to her when propriety demanded, but his gaze never left Ezio for long.

Here, she had the faintly unpleasant sensation of someone else seeing more of Ezio than she did. It made her feel young and small in ways she could not describe.

Leonardo seemed to have no household staff at all, so when the hour grew late, he went to his larder for bread and cheese. Ezio joined him, elbow to elbow, one slicing bread, the other spooning jam onto the tray. Sofia could no longer hear their conversation, but from the way their eyes now turned to her as they talked, she knew the topic. 

She tilted her head and pretended to study the paintings on the walls around her.

They ate. Or rather, she and Ezio ate. Leonardo nibbled like a bird for a few minutes and then flurried into motion. 

“Sofia,” he hesitated. “May I call you Sofia?”

“Per piacere.” She nodded.

“A few minutes ago at my pantry, I asked Ezio permission to ask you a question. You see, I did not want to offend the only person he has ever brought to my studio before.” Leonardo smiled at her, the gesture so genuine she was halfway to saying yes without knowing the query. “I know you once sat for the master Albrecht  Dürer. A fine artist, to be certain. But you may have also heard he lists me as his greatest inspiration.”

Ezio leaned in his chair, slung his arm across the back, and smirked. Sofia did not know why.

“May I sketch you?”

“Of course,” she said too quickly. “I would be honored.”

“Let us compare calendars then, madame, and we will find times for you to sit for me.”

The reason for Ezio’s bemused expression became clear. 

“Times?” 

“Even beauty is ugly when rushed,” Leonardo said as he went to fetch his book to check the dates. They could hear the rustle of papers unceremoniously thrown about.

“Times?” She whispered to Ezio, making a face, and he laughed.

“You were the one so excited to meet such a genius.”

“Will I regret it?”

Ezio looked in the direction Leonardo had disappeared. He gave the question more thoughtful pause than it needed, and he answered solemnly.

“Never.”

* * *

  
  
  


On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, Sofia rode out to Leonardo’s understated studio villa (which, she discovered, was not actually his home, a stately abode he seemed to rarely visit) and sat for him to sketch her. Sketching was supposed to be faster than sitting for a portrait, but no one had ever shared that rumor with Leonardo. Already, she had spent more time in his chair than in Durer’s for an entire commissioned painting.

He had her sit with a book at first. Natural enough, she supposed, and ordinarily, she could read anywhere. Under the intense heat of his concentration, hers withered. She found herself staring at the page like an illiterate until she could no longer resist.

She would lull him into the conversation by asking about his work, capturing his attention by drawing it to some detail or technicality, and for a time, he would entertain her with explanations. Eventually, his eyebrows would furrow together, his mouth straightened. He was lost to his work again.

The whole affair gave her so much time to think. Why would Ezio not have told her about Leonardo? She had believed she knew his life story. She could tell stories from his youth as readily as if she had been at his side through them. Yet Leonardo had never been mentioned.

It baffled her until the afternoon Leonardo finished his sketches. He handed her one. She drew her fingers over the charcoal marks in amazement. Its beauty was not in some remarkable element but in its simplicity. He had drawn her mid-sentence, exactly as she must have looked in life. The subtle lines at the corners of her mouth, hinting her age; the lifted hands, fingers frozen in motion… it was a creation born of his studies of anatomy and human physique as much as of art.

“You see exactly what is there,” she said.

“Only because that is the key to imagining what could be. Now I know you well enough I could create you from memory as a lion tamer or Assyrian princess if I was so inclined.”

Sofia smiled. “May I see them?”

“Of course.”

She thumbed through the stack. In one, he had drawn only her hands holding the book, a turning page pinched in her fingers. In another, just the twist of her braid down her back. They were lovely, technically proficient, and puzzling.

“They’re yours,” he said. 

“You spent all this time drawing just to give them away?”

“Do not take offense, Sofia, but I did not draw them for myself, lovely though you are.” He handed her a thin leather binding to hold the papers. She wrapped them inside. “In his esteem, they will top anything I else I have made for him over the years.”

She pondered it the whole way back.

* * *

  
  


The Assassins’ Guild, a surprisingly opulent den where Ezio had more friends than she had across the globe from her entire life, had an open door. It was a brazen belief that no one knew where it was, and even if they did, they could not overpower the lethal men and women within.

Ezio worked at a table in the back, standing but bent low. His fingers traced locations on the map. Sofia could not read his lips as he spoke to an assassin at his side, a woman younger than her who looked as dangerous as sharpened bone. There was a nod to Ezio, a nod to Sofia (who had assumed no one had yet seen her), and then she was gone without a trace.

“I must learn to do that,” Sofia marveled. 

“You would be my most difficult student yet,” Ezio teased. He drew an arm around the small of her back and pulled her in for a kiss. “How was your afternoon?”

“He finished his work. Apparently,” she offered the leather binding, “it was a gift for you.”

Ezio took it. He flipped through the sketches, tilting them to her to point out details she had not noticed. The final page had no drawing on it, only the words:  _ Sofia fits you. I approve. _

Confused, she lifted her head to look to Ezio. A twist of a smile on his mouth, he closed the binding.

“It is a very nice gift,” he said, voice soft. 

  
  
  
  


* * *

Later, in bed, Sofia rolled onto her elbow to ask him the only question needed to turn her inklings into certainty.

“Did Leonardo fashion your blades for you?”

Ezio did not open his eyes, still sprawled back against the pillow with the slightest hitch in his breathing. Ordinarily, she would have taken pride in flapping his unflappable stamina, but now she had a focus.

“My first ones, yes.”

“And other tools?”

He rolled on his side and nosed in to cuddle closer. “ _ Si. _ Poison darts and climbing gloves. A flying machine.”

Now there was a story she very much wanted to hear another time. 

“He is your dearest friend,” she said.

His head moved in the affirmative against her. “Of all my life.” 

A lifetime of protecting Leonardo from harm would not have ended in the eyes of a pretty shopkeeper in Constantinople. No, how much sense it made now. Ezio did not boast his friendship with the great Leonardo da Vinci because he must above all else keep him safe. His dogged protection had kept Leonardo untangled from this war between Assassins and Templars even as he knew everything, designed the weapons, bolstered the leader at the helm. 

Jealousy thickened the spit in her mouth, caught in her throat as she swallowed. She begrudged neither Leonardo nor Ezio their connection. But her lifetime had been lived in books and pages, not people, and she envied Leonardo a role she feared she would never play in anyone’s life.

Plato had believed humans wandered the world weeping, searching for the other half of themselves, severed from them by ancient, intimidated gods. For forty years, it seemed, Ezio and Leonardo had one another to keep their souls from crying.

It was a great love story all its own as perhaps all friendships are and might be.

“I am grateful to have met him,” she said simply, knowing though she did how inadequate words could be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You might not have to squint. How did Leonardo get a whole chapter in this three chapter Ezio/Sofia fic? Don't ask me those kinds of questions.
> 
> But I couldn't resist. Ezio's little "You do not need to lie to me. Salai suits you" to Leonardo in AC: Brotherhood? Sigh. Love those two.


	3. Chapter 3

Sofia’s parents would have been appalled to see their daughter befriend a peasant courtesan.

She didn’t mind betraying their memories, of course, for she had been doing so for years. Her gowns, her brazen intellectual behavior, and her many hours abed with a man who was not her husband were all equally against her upbringing. 

“You have never been to Carnivale like this before, have you?” Petra asked. They were seated before the mirror vanity, Petra’s hands buried in Sofia’s hair as she wrestled it into a fashionable style.

Sofia smiled. “No. There are no courtesans in Constantinople.”

“I don’t believe that!”

“I don’t either, I suppose. But it is a crime punishable by death there. Here, we see it as necessary for man’s urges.”

“You do not?”

“I lived in a city without it, remember? I think men are capable of fulfilling their urges with their own wives when it’s expected of them.”

Petra laughed aloud. “I am grateful our Italian men are notoriously unfaithful. The married ones can always pay more.”

“Better established, I suppose,” Sofia agreed. Petra braided the other side of Sofia’s hair with a pair of blue and yellow ribbons. They peeked in and out of the auburn strands.

“You’ll enjoy it. It’s not for business but a real party. Madame will have had the kitchen staff working for three days, and the assassins will be here as well as d’Alviano’s mercenaries. Some of the girls will invite loyal clients too, but many will take the night off.”

Sofia heard something in her voice that caught her attention. “You’ll be bringing a loyal client?”

Petra grinned in the mirror. “Yes.”

Sofia admired the perfection of her own braids and lamented how imperfect poor Petra’s would be in her hands. 

“I won’t pry, though I very much want to,” Sofia said.

“Thank you,” Petra said primly. They switched seats. Sofia put clumsy fingers to work creating the described hairstyle, a mix of twists and curls with flouncing ribbons added for good measure. 

“Perhaps today you should tell me a romance though,” Petra said with a cheeky smile. She had not yet mastered her letters, so she enjoyed being told stories from the books and tracts Sofia had read. 

“A love story,” Sofia pretended to ponder. “Won’t that bore you after the adventures we have been reading together?” 

“Not today,” Petra purred with such sincerity Sofia laughed.

“Fine. Do you know the story of Tristan and Iseult?” 

It was an old tale for which Sofia had always had a softness. It painted the characters so sympathetically, for the king loved his wife and surrogate son, the son loved his father and his lover, and the wife loved her lover and her husband. The love potion added a dash of magic to an ordinary tragedy. 

Petra, however, seemed unimpressed by the story. By the time Tristan was mortally wounded and Iseult dead over his corpse, the young lady was laughing rather than crying.

“She would never die of grief over him,” she said. “If she loved Tristan that much, she would have simply run away with him. She feared the loss of money and power and comforts more than she loved Tristan.”

Sofia had never entertained this cynical take on the tragic romance and didn’t much like it.

“I think she was young and confused.”

“Her youth is even more evidence she would have run away with him and damn the consequences.”

“You’re right,” Sofia said. She smiled at the recent memory of her closing the doors of her beloved bookshop and handing the keys to a stranger.

“What a secret smile,” Petra said, grinning. “Perhaps I should have asked you to tell me your love story rather than a musty old one from your books.”

They finished getting ready with lighter subjects, the main one being food as their stomachs grumbled and growled. When they finished, Sofia ushered Petra away from the mirror before she could admire the effect.

“I can’t fix anything you don’t like, so better for you not to know.”

On that pragmatic note, they made their way to Sofia’s first brothel Carnivale. 

  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Ask any Venetian about Carnivale, and you will discover a bone-deep pride and snobbery you believed impossible when talking about Bacchanalian revelry. You will hear about the preferred mask maker -- _No one is better, no one in all of Italy_ \-- and the best concoction for ovi odoriferi -- _Forbidden? No, no. Discouraged, yes, but rosewater is the key._

If you ask a young person about Carnivale, the blushes will turn them crimson. If you are lucky enough to ask someone older and wiser, you will hear old stories scandalous enough to turn you crimson.

“It’s not Venezia, but it’s pretty,” Sofia said as she looked down the staircase. 

“Nothing is Venezia during Carnivale,” Ezio replied. He offered her his arm, the gentleman of good breeding showing through the debonair playboy. 

“You’ve been?”

“Not for pleasure,” he replied with a shrug. As they walked down the stairs, she could tell he was looking at her. “Where did you get that dress? I have not seen it before.”

“I borrowed it from Tullia. She’s just my size.” 

“A lady in a whore’s dress,” he said, “I think I may have achieved my destiny.”

“I’m eternally grateful you’ve introduced me to La Rosa in Fiore,” she said, surprised at how true it was. “I have never been a part of a woman’s world, and I used to think myself superior for that. I was wrong.”

“If we stop learning, we stop living. Now enough serious talk. I am told this is going to be quite a party.”

He placed his _bauta_ over his face. It was silver, black, and red with deep gullies and intricate carvings. Through its open mouth, he grinned wolfishly at her. She pulled her feathered _colombina_ over her eyes and nose.

“ _A Carnevale ogni scherzo vale_ , _”_ she reminded him.

Imagine her surprise when a courtesans’ Carnivale was not bawdy but fun with a sweetness all its own. Wine flowed freely, and musicians played songs she had never heard before alongside dances she did not know. All men found female partners, but the women danced with one another more often than not, throwing their heads back in laughter, tweaking one another’s artful decorations. Sofia noted that no one wore the trademark hairstyle of their profession.

This was the Carnivale jest. In Venezia, everyday folk became people of the street. Here in La Rosa in Fiore, the street people became courtiers. 

Her skin and cheeks buzzed and burned with the wine she had enjoyed. Petra swept her onto the dance floor, whispering in her ear to point out her date, a young man Sofia recognized from the nearby dottore. 

“He’s handsome,” Sofia whispered back. 

Petra shushed her, though Sofia could not understand why. 

“He’s really handsome, and he’d probably like to be dancing with you,” Sofia continued.

“We’ve danced several measures. I’ll teach him another new one in a few minutes.”

“That sounds smart.” She booped her finger off the end of Petra’s nose. The girl laughed aloud.

“Madame was not joking when she said you had been drinking liberally.”

“A few glasses. Nothing to excess.”

Petra laughed again. “Sofia, tonight’s refreshment is not just wine. It’s the cook’s very own _acquavite_.”

“Oh.” One step too quickly to the right, and she wobbled on her feet for a second. She heard someone giggling at her clumsiness only to realize the laugh was her own.

“A little intoxication amongst friends is always fine,” Petra soothed, holding Sofia steady. 

They spun a few more times around the floor, Sofia ebullient in her enthusiasm over Petra’s beauty and her handsome date and Petra dishing it back with the occasional wink. What began as a buzz tipped over into a blur. Everything around her moved a little too slowly and a little too quickly all at once.

“Oh, Ezio, wonderful,” Petra was carelessly casual, touched by the party’s noise and joy, “Your lady would like to dance.” 

Sofia saw him now at the edge of the makeshift ballroom floor coming for her with both hands extended, and she reached out for him too. The warm, solid breadth of his chest held her up when her legs no longer wished to. He and Petra said something to one another, but Sofia did not bother to listen. The music was too pretty, the sound of slippers and boots adding percussion to something lively. 

“I don’t know this dance,” she said, perhaps to Ezio, perhaps just to the universe.

“Me either.” His voice rumbled through her bones. “Shall we skip it and retire to our room?”

“Are you just saying that because I can no longer feel my feet?”

“No,” Ezio said. “But you are no longer using them, and that might be a problem for the evening.”

Curiously, she peeked down to see she had, in fact, left her feet, supported entirely by his sturdy hands at her waist. She loved the dancing and the music, though. She dwelt on that idea for a moment, but the bedroom had already crept into her five senses. His skin would taste like his soap, for nothing mortal and ordinary broke him into a sweat, and his voice would be better than this band, better than anything else she knew. 

“Bed sounds nice,” she conceded. 

Ezio unceremoniously upended her, and rather than pay attention, she cuddled into him and closed her eyes. He was so peaceful to touch. She heard him kiss Claudia goodnight, felt some of his laughter through her body, and admired the soft fadeaway of the music as they went home.

“I miss the music,” she murmured to the scratchy fabric of his doublet.

“My singing days are behind me.”

“Just one song,” she pleaded. A grasping hand slipped up until she felt confident she was cradling his cheek. 

“A story instead,” he said and told her of breaking into Topkapi Palace dressed as a street musician singing terrible Italian songs. He helped her out of her heavy dress, unbraided the ribbons from her hair, and put her to bed before he had even gotten to the end of the story.

She thought she heard her own snore as the alcohol carried her off to sleep.

  
  


* * *

  
  
  


_“Il cielo mi aiuti.”_

Sofia cursed every ounce of acquavite in the kitchen, the city of Roma, and the world. All its touted healing powers must be a lie, for she had never had such a pounding headache in her life. The bed beneath her had become concrete overnight, the pillows lumps of lead. She groaned into one such torture device before dragging herself to her feet.

“Ezio,” she moaned his name in the least sexy way possible. She tried again, but the results were the same. He was not there. She drew back the curtains. The sun, already high in the sky, made her hiss in pain. 

In a forty-minute process, Sofia prepared herself enough to go down to the kitchen and beg the cook for relief. Surely anyone who would make such a thing would make the antidote. 

Slipping away from her own pale, drawn reflection in the mirror was another defense mechanism. If she knew herself capable of looking this bedraggled, it might damage her confidence.

The courtesans who greeted her did so in gentle, hushed tones. She could have kissed each one of them for that knowing compassion. 

But as she neared the kitchen, she could hear voices from Claudia’s sitting room: the madam herself but also clearly her brother. 

Eavesdropping was wrong, yes, but in a house of iniquity, where murder was often moral and impropriety economic, Sofia excused herself this little flaw. She found a spot right by the doorway, conveniently located by a bookshelf where the girls traded with one another. Sofia picked up one of the pamphlets -- a treatise against prostitution written by a local priest but annotated with amusing comments and cartoons from the courtesans -- as her excuse.

“--enough young men and women to fill our ranks ten times over,” Claudia was saying.

“ _Si._ The rich have always stepped on the backs of the poor to reach new heights. The people are still tired.”

“I expect there will always be work. Is that why you stay?”

“Hmmm?” Sofia could almost see the body language that would have accompanied this inquisitive sound. Ezio might have stood at the fireplace or edge of the room, would have turned his head, looked over his shoulder without bringing his body around too. 

“You have been here for weeks. Have you returned to lead your brotherhood?”

In the silence, Sofia waited for his voice.

“I am waiting for my next war. All my life, I have been pulled from one battle to the next. When I returned to Monteriggioni as a younger man, I believed myself free, but now I am wiser.”

“Ezio,” Claudia sounded sad. “Sofia did not follow you here to live as an assassin’s mistress tucked away in a brothel.” 

“It is not that easy. The war is not over. The Templar influence still spans much of Europe.”

“Perhaps you have won enough battles for one man.”

“I very much doubt my enemies will see it that way.”

Sofia could bear to hear nothing else that was not hers. She put down the pamphlet and went to beg the cook for sustenance and reprieve.

  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Sofia ran two fingers along the dusty edge of the shelf and held them up for the proprietor to see. He hemmed and hawed. She stared him down, stock still.

The little shop on the edge of town had classic Mercante D’Arte signage with a small, hand-painted addendum below proclaiming Libros. Sofia had explored most of southern Roma looking for this place, one of the only bookshops in the city according to Petra. Imagine her surprise when it was not so much a bookshop as a cart of religious tracts stuffed into the back of an art store. Imagine her further surprise upon discovering the proprietor was an angry old man who seemed to like neither art nor books. Though his affinity for wine was clear if the empty bottles strewn about his workspace could be trusted.

“So there is a little dust,” he retorted, angrily jutting his hands at her. “It is hard to find time to clean when I am so busy.”

“I have run a shop before. A busy shop does not accumulate dust on its shelves.”

“Because of some dust, you ask me to give you everything for a pittance!” 

“You have a gift for the dramatic. Perhaps your local actors would hire you to join their troupe.”

“That price is a tragedy!”

“And in spite of your complaining, you are not turning down my offer.”

She won in the end as she was accustomed to doing. Sofia Sartor, world traveler and knowledge seeker, now owned a shop with twenty dusty forgeries and a handful of books. Though she wore a fine blue gown, she set to work right away cleaning and rearranging. 

When her inventory’s worth (or lack thereof) became clear, she borrowed a horse from the nearby stable and made her way out to Leonardo’s rural studio. Unlike Ezio, she knocked.

“Ah, Sofia.” Leonardo smiled with true pleasure. “A welcome surprise. How are you?”

“Very well. I just purchased a shop here in Roma.”

“Congratulations are in order! You must be pleased to return to your life’s work.”

How easy it was to like this man who so understood purpose. 

“I am, and I have a business proposition for you.”

She sweet-talked Leonardo into some of his least inventive sketches, a small canvas or two, all for less than his signature alone was worth. He agreed to have them wrapped up and sent to her shop, bade her give Ezio his love, and returned to his patron’s latest request while the sun still soaked the small space.

From a pigeon coop on the edge of the city, she sent a message to the Assassin’s Guild with the address and a request not to hold dinner on her account. 

To sell items, one must make them beautiful. Shoppers think the items themselves are what draw them in, but Sofia knew better. A painting in the wrong place, in the wrong light, leaned haphazardly against a wall could not be lovely enough to be seen, even if painted by Leonardo da Vinci himself. 

Sofia separated the paintings to create open space, moving them so at least one was visible to passerby from every angle past the shop. There were not enough books yet to make them a draw, but she scattered them near the paintings anyway. 

When the messenger arrived with her Leonardos, she gave him extra coins and took her time deciding how to place the sketches where the signatures would be clearly illuminated. 

And when Ezio arrived, he entered this shop with the same magnificence of presence as her bookstore in Constantinople. She smiled at him.

“Hello, signore. How may I help you?”

“I am looking for a woman. Beautiful. Intelligent. _Audace._ I heard I might find her here.”

“Really?”

“I was surprised too. I have some acquaintance with the old drunkard who owns this shop, and I would not have expected this lady to enjoy his company.”

As always, he outlasted her, and she tumbled into his arms for a kiss.

“I did not enjoy his company at all, so to avoid it, I purchased this shop.” 

“Sofia,” Ezio’s fond teasing met the honest set of her face and changed. “You are serious.”

“ _Si._ I will stay in Rome,” she said simply. “You do not feel free to leave here, and now it is my home too. As long as you will have me, I will stay with you, but when you will not, I will still visit Italy’s best printing presses and bring the newest literature to Rome right under the Vatican’s noses.”

Once again, as they had been so many times since meeting Ezio, words were not enough. How could she tell him that she understood his fear? His battles might not be over. He might not be able to put down his blade and his sword. In the corners of her mind and heart, those same worries lurked, for she may have fallen in love with a warrior who must die on the blade. 

But she could soothe another fear, a different one. She could make it so he knew she could live with that. Her life had been full and rich and happy before he ever walked into it. She could love him completely and yet still live without him. Though she would complain about a stubbed toe for a week, she could bear a broken heart for a lifetime. 

Sofia Sartor da Venezia had her own steel. She did not need Ezio’s.

He did not look comforted. His eyes narrowed, the lines at their corners crinkling in concern. 

“I have not been clear,” he said. Her heart did not drop in its chest. It stalled. He held her close as he spoke. “I shared our creed with you because it is the only secret of mine to share, the only piece of my soul I have cultivated these decades. There is nothing left of me that is not Assassin. My creed was all I could offer to show I will never wish to be parted from you.”

His emphasis on “I,” so gentle, so soft, made it clear: he did not know.

 _“Vedo_. Never?”

He kissed her forehead. “Never.”

“You still have time to be a husband and a father. If you do not have enough left in your heart to be either, then I will live in your bed and your smile and my books. But I will not leave.”

“Sofia?” His voice was the softest of questions.

Of all the codes a polite young lady was raised upon, her reticence and caution were most important. A polite lady must never be perceived as forward or brazen; she must always demur. Though Sofia had not lived her life that way, her stomach still betrayed her with a nauseating somersault.

“I will only be a wife and mother if you wish to be a husband and father, for I will never wish to be parted from you either. I am forever yours, whether you will have me or not,” she said.

He looked at her. The long seconds escaped without reprieve. She reddened under the intensity of his gaze, the shameless intimacy of his eyes on hers. Her throat tightened. Tears welled up. 

“Then marry me, _mia cara, mia Sofia_. _”_

Only when she had nodded vigorously, losing control of her crying entirely, did he nuzzle against her cheek and joke once more.

“Shall I offer you a more traditional proposal later? I could hire street musicians to serenade you and bring you a hundred white tulips.”

“A thousand,” she countered. His laugh rumbled through her, but the voice at her ear became tender again.

“I have the rest of my life to find you a thousand white tulips. You can count them out.” 

“Take your time.”

  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  


They spent a lifetime together, nearly 30 years. 

They married in the quiet of a chapel with only a handful of witnesses. Sofia wore traditional bridal clothing, Ezio his robes. They went on a honeymoon trip that lasted two months in which they wrote letters to no one and lived without responsibilities.

Upon their return, Ezio mentored once more. He was a fine teacher who kept the brotherhood from becoming a monument to itself. 

Even when they built a small estate outside the city, Sofia spent her days in her shop. Literacy was spreading across Italia, slowly but surely, and the people who came to her were no longer just scholars and men. 

Through struggles of conception and one agonizing stillbirth, Sofia bore them two children. Ezio doted on the babies as if he were a young man himself, astounded and touched by the simplest of pleasures. 

Flavia worshipped at his feet, learned a blade before she learned her steps to the _pavane._ Marcellus’ wickedness and goodness knew no bounds, for he was Ezio Auditore da Firenze reborn. 

Ezio brought Sofia her tulips often but rarely in ordinary ways. A customer would turn up with one he had been handed in the street. Petra and her husband would visit with a jar of them in hand, a smug Ezio offering to put them in a vase. Marcellus would leave one behind with his apology note when he disappeared to God knows where for a few days.

And when Ezio died, he left behind a letter and a wrapped parcel in his study. The letter became Sofia’s constant companion, words she never shared with anyone but carried with her always. 

Unwrapped, the package turned out to be a series of sketches. There were tulips tucked in books, tulips crowded together in broken pottery, a fistful of tulips clutched by a hand that could only have belonged to Ezio. The sketches bore a familiar signature from someone already gone, and the last page had a tiny scrawled note: _He tells me this is a promise kept._

Sofia missed him all the remaining days of her life. She had ample opportunity, for his story, told by many tongues in many dialects, outlived her as well.

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love this couple. I love Leonardo. I love the Ezio trilogy.


End file.
